Migrations were initially meant for good questions that happened to be in the wrong place or to preserve answers that were already given... now it has become a shipping lane for crappy questions (not saying this one is) and more often than not, such questions are dupes. Instead of unnecessarily pissing off other site mods by migrating such dupes, better point these new users there.. then it's entirely their problem as to how they deal with the user and the question.

Sometimes, users ask questions on Computational Science about doing something in Wolfram Alpha. As far as I can tell, Wolfram Alpha uses Mathematica for its math engine. Are those questions on topic here?

@Heike It turns out it's because the expression I'm showing takes a long time to render. Rasterizing it made it much better. The difference between TabView and FlipView is that the former shows the old image until the new one is rendered while the latter shows a white background.

@Verbeia Do you have any new statistics for last week? It seems the visit count has plateaued and the question rate has stabilized as well.

As most of the users may know, we developed a language extension for google-code-prettify to support the correct highlighting of Mathematica code on mathematica.stackexchange.com. Currently, this extension can be tested by installing it as local JavaScript-plugin into your browser. A detailed dis...

I think the question rate is starting to turn up in the last day or two.

You're right that visits have been bumping around between 670 and 710. But we have more and more avid users, and more than a third of people who have ever registered have visited in the last couple of days.

Here's one I haven't done before, a "barcode" of when users were last seen. I'm using FillingStyle -> Directive[AbsoluteThickness[0.4], Opacity[0.3]]. Notice the dark strip in the past few hours. People are coming back.

How do you obtain a figure similar to Matlab's figures? That is, how can you make Mathematica have a white background inside the axes and some other color outside the axes. See the following figure:
Here is an attempt to replicate the looks of a Matlab figure
Framed@Plot[Sin[x], {x, 1, 10},
...

@Eli My answer was "leaky" (colour leaking outside the frame) and does not add anything to yours. If I were reading the question as an outsider, I'd prefer to have only what you wrote and no clutter. So I deleted mine :-) Above 4000 I don't care about rep score any more (at least not while we're still in beta).

And even if I did, in this case deleting would be what benefitted the site and community more.

@MrWizard I was just curious, it seemed like it should have been migrated, instead of closed. Since it wasn't, I was wondering about the reasoning behind that choice for my own edification. @yoda gave a sound explanation, and I'm duly ejimicated now. :)

@Verbeia thanks for the stats. The slight uptick in ?'s/day is nice to see alongside with a growth in avid users.

From time to time, I would like to use Mathematica purely numerically, e.g., plotting a function which is defined as an integral which cannot be solve numerically or a solution of a differential equation, or ... . It turns out that mathematica is rather efficient (I would say comparable to matlab...

@Szabolcs A former office-mate of mine is Chinese, and he made an interesting point about Chinese characters: it is more like a programming language than English (or, other western tongue) is. A character in Chinese conveys semantic meaning, not pronunciation, while the characters in the Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek alphabets carry pronunciation, not semantic meaning. So, walking through Tokyo airport, he could read the signs, but could not pronounce them.

In imperial China, this worked out well, as the government could send out proclamations, and everyone could read them despite have many regional dialects. This would not have been possible in a western style language.

@rcollyer Please don't ever say "Western style language" ;-) this is a property of the writing system and not the language itself. Also, it is not really true that a Chinese character conveys meaning, actually it's a lot more complex than that. If you're interested, look up the book of John DeFrancis, especially this chapter

W Hannas's books have a lot of very interesting information as well, but I don't agree with his main point (i.e. that the writing system inhibits creativity). I just think learning Chinese characters is a waste of time.

The reason I'm learning them is that currently that's the only viable approach to learning Chinese.

@Szabolcs I don't think it bypasses "the restrictive intermediary of speech," just that their meanings remain relatively standard, so that someone who knows one dialect can read a message written by someone who knows another dialect. Of course, both would have to stick to a standard set of symbols, or the usefulness is lost.

@yoda I have my reasons but it is definitely not the "beauty" of Chinese characters. Those are what kept me from starting for a long time. I used to have lots of Chinese colleagues, so it seemed like a better choice than Greek (which I could only practice in writing). Also, I find the language quite interesting.

@rcollyer If you read the two chapters I linked to, you'll see how that is not completely true. It is a common misconception that Chinese characters represent meanings. They are in fact very much tied to one language (or one dialect of Chinese if we prefer the term "dialect"). Of course it's true that someone who knows Chinese can guess a lot about a Japanese text, but they can't read it completely and one of the reasons it's intelligbile is the huge influence of CHinese on Japanese.

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den () is a 92-character modern poem written in Classical Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982), in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. It is a famous example of constrained writing. The sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a well-known example of this type of writing in English.
The text, although written in Classical Chinese, can be easily comprehended by most educated readers. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large d...

Another problem for me is that I am not good with languages, so I have a somewhat unusual approach to learning: understand grammar rules and focus on writing. Then theoretically one can use the grammar rules in conjunction with a dictionary to build sentences and write a few emails. Theoretically. In practice it does not work. But it is a very good exercise.

With Chinese I can't really practice by reading/writing because the writing system is more difficult than the spoken language. And the grammar is rather minimal and de-emphasized in teaching materials (even though there are some very important points)

So it was like the most difficult possible choice. :-)

People who have a talent to learn languages can pick them up really quickly by listening and trying to speak. That is my weakest point.

I had a French teacher who studied Italian as well as French at university. Years later she decided to learn Romanian, but apparently Italian and Romanian were so similar that she kept mixing them up. In the end she could speak neither Italian nor Romanian any more.

In Hungarian it is possible to derive a lot. It is an agglutinative language, meaning that each grammatical function has a suffix which can be attached to the word. When two things need to be indicated, we attach two suffixes. For example, plural is -k and object (similar to the accusative case) is -t. For plural objects we attach both --> apple = alma, almák, almát, almákat. This works when deriving new words too: different suffixes change the meaning in different ways ...

Hebrew () (, ', ) is a West Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, although other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language was also used by non-Jewish groups, such as the ethnically related Samaritans.
Modern Hebrew is spoken by most of the eight million people in Israel, while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world. The language is attested from the 10th century BCE to the late Secon...

How do you obtain a figure similar to Matlab's figures? That is, how can you make Mathematica have a white background inside the axes and some other color outside the axes. See the following figure:
Here is an attempt to replicate the looks of a Matlab figure
Framed@Plot[Sin[x], {x, 1, 10},
...

I frequently generate framed plots like this:
Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 2 \[Pi]}, Frame -> True]
Is there an easy way to change the background color of the framed region only?
Specifying the Background option changes the background color of the entire plot, not just the framed region:
Plot[Si...

There is no rule... usually, older questions are already answered and you end up merging the new to the old. However, the master should in general be the clearer question. The answers don't matter because you'll have the same set of answers whichever way you merge

In this case, I think merging old to new is the better solution... some laws of causality might be violated, but that's ok :)

Please wipe the off-topic & obsolete comments on the old one... I guess from the meta question (which was spurred by my flagging, but not on my answer), my take away was that people don't generally like comments to be deleted, but... let's admit it, we were all loose tongued and chatty on SO since we weren't active in chat. We're more disciplined now and keep such comments to this room

The fact that this is not an exact duplicate is a complication. Let me put that aside for the moment. If I was on the ball I could have closed the new question before you answered it. Is that the optimal solution?

How about lets forget about reputation scores and who answered first for a moment and let's try to make it a useful question? Merging would involve editing too, so edit the question and the answers so they fit each other and are as useful as possible for future visitors. (It's a lot of work though)

I agree with szabolcs here. Perhaps the best solution is to edit the question to also include the inverse — no need for it to be a second question. And @MrWizard If you feel bad for robbing simon of a +15, remember that you can vote for him again here =)

@yoda it's actually not the points but the Accept that bothers me. I just feel like it was his solution, and he should get credit. Of course we cannot preserve a perfect record of who created what, and if we did I'd lose 90% of my Accepts because someone somewhere (MathGroup, etc.) had the method first.

@MrWizard I don't know ... I think that the version of the question and the answer here were more clear and more generally useful. It could have been taken as an opportunity to have a cleaner version of the question here than on SO. But migration makes sense as well.

Close as a duplicate and wait for a few days to see how the community responds... perhaps it could've been an over sight.. perhaps OP might've wanted to edit and make his question not-a-dupe after seeing the other question, etc.

Do you ever get worried about the future of SE? I can't even imagine where they get the money from to pay so many employees. I read the Wolfram blog post about MathGroup, and even MG seems to have cost a lot of money to run. Based on past experience all great sites start to impose restrictions, and become not so great or not so free eventually. Like Last.fm ...

@yoda I checked. They're advertising Careers 90% of the time. Occasionally they're advertising other SE sites. The only way I could get other ads was looking at the top voted questions in the C# tag. Other popular tags (e.g. java) did not give me any non-SE-related ads.

I'm somewhat torn. I would have expected a couple of answers on how to accomplish his goal, or a rewrite of his code. I'd consider doing it as a SparseArray and ArrayRules to accomplish it. It is more specific than the usual list-manipulations, though.

@yoda I think the OP has only solved part of the problem. As far as I understand, he wants to swap two elements in an array. He got halfway there by doing Si[[i,j]]=Extract[Si,pos], but still needs to set the the entry at position pos to the old value of Si[[i,j]].

How can this code be improved, for example, by including shadows, raytracing or the effects of gravity to make it more realistic?
I felt that this question deserved an answer. The one I describe here is to create a set of confetti "agents" that respond in quasi-physical ways to external for...

My flatmate tried to overclock his but the OS started to crash and do weird stuff, even though it never went above 50 C according to the sensors. But then he doesn't really know how to overclock, so he gave up.

There is really very little to do with these new chips. It's not even really overclocking as they are designed for it (the K CPUs) and the system basically regulates itself. The original Core 2 Duo line was a lot more interesting to play with. I had a 1.8 running a 3.34.

@MrWizard Graphics rendering is too slow. Once I found that the slowest step isn't even the actual rendering, but 1. converting Graphics stuff to GraphicsBox stuff and 2. compressing it before sending it to the front end for rasterization

@rcollyer I'd be astonished if VCs took standard bonds, i.e. senior debt. Yes, you get paid out first in a bankruptcy, but there is no upside if the firm wins big. Equity (stocks) is a share of the company and thus the profits. Maybe they took some kind of convertible debt instrument or preferred share: you are more likely to get a return in the early years (they get paid even if shareholders get no dividend) and at some point you get to convert to shares.